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Solution Manual for Operations and

Supply Chain Management for the 21st


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Boyer/Verma's breakthrough text meets today's student and instructor's
needs and redefines the marketplace. Their text is briefer than most,
taking all of the vital core concepts and building upon them with current
and fresh examples. The authors understand the importance of striking a
balance by creating a book that does an even better job at covering the
core concepts while also providing customers with a new product that
fully addresses and approaches this course area from today's teaching
and learning perspectives and actual business practices. The three
unifying themes throughout the book are Strategy, Global Supply Chain,
and Service Operations. Strategy will serve as an overarching
framework and will be used in each chapter to present students with an
alternative approach to specific challenges. The authors uses examples
from non-US companies and/or organizations in each chapter to
incorporate Service Operations in the book. They also show that even
some of the largest manufacturing companies today have extensive
service activities such as customer support and product development.
The Global Supply Chain theme will allow students to see how products
move through different companies and countries with Boyer/Verma's use
of real world examples throughout his text. In addition the robust Cnow
course allows instructors and students to go beyond the printed text to
get the most from this exciting operations management program.
Ken Boyer is a Dean's Distinguished Professor of operations
management at the Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University.
Dr. Boyer is co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Operations
Management. Dr. Boyer previously was a professor of supply chain
management at the Broad College of Management, Michigan State
University from 2000 to 2008. Prior to that, he was an assistant/associate
professor at DePaul University from 1995 to 2000. He earned a B.S. in
mechanical engineering from Brown University, and a M.A. and Ph.D.
in Business Administration from Ohio State University. Dr. Boyer
worked as a project engineer with General Dynamics Electric Boat
Division in Groton, CT. Dr. Boyer's research interests focus on the
strategic management of operations, electronic commerce and the
effective use of advanced manufacturing technologies. He has published
articles in Management Science, Sloan Management Review, Decision
Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, and Business Horizons,
among others. His research received the 1997 Chan Hahn award, the
1996 Stan Hardy award and the 2004 Wick Skinner award. Dr. Boyer
received the 2007 John D. and Dortha J. Withrow Teacher-Scholar
Award at Michigan State University. He co-wrote the book Extending
the Supply Chain: How Cutting-Edge Companies Bridge the Critical
Last Mile into Customers' Homes, American Management Association,
2005. He is a member of the Academy of Management, Decision
Sciences Institute and the Production and Operations Management
Society. Rohit Verma is a Professor of Service Operations Management
& Executive Director at the Center for Hospitality Research in the
School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. Prior to his current
appointment, he was the George Eccles Professor of Management,
David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. He has also
taught MBA and executive development classes at DePaul University,
Chicago; University of Sydney; Norwegian School of Logistics;
Helsinki School of Economics; and Indian School of Business. His
research interests include new product/service design, quality
management and process improvement, supplier selection strategies, and
operations/marketing interrelated issues. He has published over 50
articles in prestigious business journals such as California Management
Review, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Journal of
Operations Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management,
Journal of Service Research, MIT Sloan Management Review,
Production and Operations Management, and more. Verma has received
several teaching and research awards, including the Skinner Award for
Early Career Research Accomplishments from the Production and
Operations Management Society; Sprit of Inquiry Award, the highest
honor for scholarly activities within DePaul University; Teaching
Innovation Award, DePaul University; and Doctoral Faculty Teaching
Award, University of Utah. He serves as an Associate Editor of Journal
of Operations Management, and Decision Sciences; Senior Editor of
Production and Operations Management; and Editorial Board Member
of Journal of Service Research, Quality Management Journal,
Operations Management Research and Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.
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broken. The enemy was panic-stricken and thrown into a mad
disorder.
“Who attacked?” asked German prisoners.
“Foch’s Army of Reserve,” was the answer.
“He has no Reserves!” they said with rage. “It was impossible for
him to have an Army of Reserve.”
It was an Army of Reserve gathered piecemeal, flung together,
hurled forward in a master stroke of strategy, at the last minute of the
eleventh hour. It was the second “Miracle” of the Marne.
That battle broke the spirit of the German people and of the
German army. They knew that only retreat and defeat lay ahead of
them. They had struck their last great blow and it had failed. They
had used up their man-power. They, certainly, had no Army of
Reserve. They could only hope that the French and British were as
exhausted as themselves and that the Americans were still unready.
They prepared for a general retreat when the British army took the
offensive of August, 1918, and never stopped fighting along the
whole length of its line until the day of armistice, while the French
and Americans pressed the Germans on their own front.
The American army, inexperienced, raw, not well handled by some
of its generals, fought with the valour which all the world expected,
and suffered great losses and made its weight felt. The sight of the
American troops was a message of doom to the Germans. They
knew that behind this vanguard was a vast American army,
irresistible as a moving avalanche. However great the slaughter of
these soldiers from the New World, pressing on in the face of
machine-gun fire, and lashed to death, millions would follow on, and
then more millions. The game was up for Germany, and they knew it,
and were stricken. Yet they played the game, this grisly game, to the
end, with a valour, a science and a discipline which was the supreme
proof of their quality as great soldiers. It was a fighting retreat,
orderly and controlled, although the British army never gave them a
day’s respite, attacked and attacked, captured masses of prisoners,
thousands of guns, and broke their line again and again.
The Last Three Months

That sweep forward of the British in the last three months was an
astounding achievement. They were the same men who halted on
the armistice line down from Mons as those who had begun the
attack three months before. They had few reinforcements. They had
gone beyond their heavy guns, almost out of reach of their transport.
Their losses had been heavy. There was no battalion at more than
half its strength. They had been strained to the last fibre of nervous
energy. But they had never slackened up. They were inspired by
more than mortal strength, by the exultation of advance, the
liberation of great cities, the rescue of populations long under
German rule, the fever of getting forward to the end at last.
The delirious welcome of the liberated peoples awakened some of
the first emotions of war which had long seemed dead. The entry
into Lille was unforgettable. The first men in khaki were surrounded
by wild crowds of men and women weeping with joy at the sight of
them. Their buttons and shoulder straps were torn off as souvenirs.
They were kissed by old women, bearded men, young girls, babies.
Once again rose the cry of “Vivent les Anglais!” as in the beginning
of the war. Our men were glad to be alive that day to get the
welcome of these people who had suffered mental torture and many
tyrannies during those four years under German rule. The fire of
gratitude warmed cold hearts, re-lit enthusiasm, made it all seem
worth while after all. Surely the French in Lille, the Belgians in
Bruges, the people of Tournai, Cambrai, Valenciennes, Liége, have
not forgotten those days of liberation. Surely they did not join in the
cynical chorus which rose against England in France, or at least in
the French press, during the years that followed? That to me is
unbelievable, with these memories in my heart.
It was Marshal Foch himself who acknowledged with generous
warmth that in these last months of war it was the hammer strokes of
the British army which did most to break the German war machine to
bits, by enormous captures of prisoners, guns, and ground. General
Ludendorff has said so, squarely, in his books; and history will record
it, though it was quickly forgotten in some countries and never known
in others. It is only for the sake of truth that it is worth recalling now,
for there is no boast of victory in the hearts of men, knowing its cost
and its horror, and no glory left about that war except the memory of
the world’s youth which suffered on both sides of the line.

The Coming of Peace

So it ended, with a kind of stupefaction in the minds of the


soldiers. It was an enormous relief, followed by a kind of lassitude of
body and spirit. Ended at last! Incredible! At the front on the day of
armistice there was no wild exultation, except in a few messes here
and there behind the lines. The men who had fought through it, or
through enough of it to have been soaked in its dirt, were too tired to
cheer or sing or shout because peace had come. Peace! What did
that mean? Civilian life again? Impossible to readjust one’s mind to
that. Impossible to go home and pick up the old threads of life as
though this Thing had not happened. They were different men. Their
minds had been seared by dreadful experience. Now that peace had
come after that long strain something snapped in them.
Many of them had a curiously dead feeling at first. They thought
back to all the things they had seen and done and suffered, and
remembered the old comrades who had fallen on the way. Perhaps
they were the lucky ones, those who lay dead, especially those who
had died before disillusion and spiritual revolt against this infernal
business. A war for civilisation?... Civilisation had been outraged by
its universal crime. A war against militarism? Militarism had been
enthroned in England and France. Liberty, free speech, truth itself,
had been smashed by military orders and discipline over the bodies
and souls of men. A war against the “Huns?” Poor old Fritz! Poor
bloody old Fritz! Not such a bad sort after all, man for man and mass
for mass. They had put up a wonderful fight. The glory of victory?
Well, it had left the world in a mess of ruin, and the best had died.
What would come out of this victory? What reward for the men who
had fought, or for any nation? The profiteers had done very well out
of war. The Generals had rows of ribbons on their breasts. Youth had
perished; the finest and noblest. Civilisation had been saved? To Hell
with a civilisation which had allowed this kind of thing! No, when
peace came, there were millions of men who did not rejoice much,
because they were sick and tired and all enthusiasm was dead
within them. They were like convicts after long years of hard labour
standing at the prison gates open to them with liberty and life
beyond. What’s the good of life to men whose spirit has been
sapped, or of liberty to men deprived of it so long they were almost
afraid of it? Strange, conflicting emotions, hardly to be analysed, tore
at men’s hearts on the night of armistice. Shipwrecked men do not
cheer when the storm abates and the bodies of their dead comrades
float behind them. Nor did our men along the front where it was very
quiet that day after a bugle here and there sounded the “Cease fire!”
and the guns were silenced at last. Peace!... Good God!
II.—THE UNCERTAIN PEACE

Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the
mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life
goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting
problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual
hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer
conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery
of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius,
activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy
whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. A new
generation of youth has grown up since the beginning of the war.
Boys of ten at that time of history are now twenty, and not much
interested in that old tale. Girls who were twelve are now mothers of
babes. The war! Bother the war! Let’s forget it and get on with life. In
that youth is right. It is not in its nature nor in moral health to dwell on
morbid memories. But it is hard on those whose service is forgotten
—so soon. In England—ten years after—there are still 58,000
wounded soldiers in the hospitals—and in France great numbers
more; but they are hidden away, as a painful secret of things that
happened. Only now and again the sight of their hospital blue in
some quiet country lane, near their hiding places, shocks one with a
sharp stab of remorse. We had forgotten all that. We hate to be
reminded of it.

Fading Memories

Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of
their experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed
unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in
France and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought,
or where they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport
under shell fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place
where the waggons were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was
blown to bits, where old Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something
has passed a sponge across those tablets of memory—things that
happened afterwards. Now and again at Divisional banquets officers
try to revive the spirit of those days and exchange yarns about
trench warfare and days of battle. It is queer how they remember
only the jokes, the laughable things, the comradeship, the thrill. The
horror has passed.
Something else has passed; the comradeship itself, between
officers and men, between all classes united for a time in common
sacrifice and service, annihilating all differences of rank and social
prejudice and wealth at the beginning of the war. It seemed then as
though nothing could ever again build up those barriers of caste. The
muddiest, dirtiest, commonest soldier from the slums or the factories
or the fields was a hero before whom great ladies were eager to
kneel in devotion and love, to cut away his blood-stained clothes, to
dress his wounds. In the canteens the pretty ladies slaved like
drudges to give cocoa or any comfort to “the boys” from the front. In
the trenches or in ruins under shell fire young officers wrote home
about their men: “They’re too splendid for words!... I am proud to
command such a topping crowd.... They make me feel ashamed of
things I used to think about the working man. There is nothing too
good for them.” The British Government thought so too, and
promised them great rewards—“homes for heroes,” good wages for
good work, “a world safe for democracy.”

The Barriers of Class

Ten years after, the classes have fallen apart again. The old
hostilities between Capital and Labour have been revived with
increasing bitterness in many minds. The old barriers have been
rebuilt in many countries. For a time, even in England, there was a
revolutionary spirit among the men who had served, and a sense of
fear and hostility against those who had said that nothing was too
good for them. “Our heroes” became very quickly “those damned
Socialists,” or those “dirty dogs” who are never satisfied, or those
lazy scoundrels who would rather live on the “dole” than take an
honest job. The men who had saved England were suspected of
plotting for her overthrow, subsidised by Russian money and
seduced by the propaganda of a secret society inspired by the spirit
of Anti-Christ.
Ten years after the closing up of ranks, the surrender of self
interest, and a spiritual union, England is again seething with strikes,
industrial conflict, political passion, and class consciousness. There
are still a million and a quarter unemployed officially registered in
Great Britain, and half a million more not on the registers and worse
off. Instead of “homes for heroes” the working people in the great
cities are shamefully overcrowded. In the agricultural districts of
England young men who fought in the Last Crusade and marched
with Allenby to Jerusalem, or those boys who left their fields in ’14
for the dirty ditches in Flanders—for England’s sake—are getting
twenty-five shillings a week, upon which a single man can hardly live
and a married man must starve. And ten years after they poured out
their blood and treasure without a grudge, without reservation, first in
the field and last out of it, the old “quality” of England or their
younger sons are selling up their old houses to pay taxes which are
extinguishing them as a class, depriving them of their old power and
prerogatives, and changing the social structure of the nation by an
economic revolution which is almost accomplished. On both sides
there is bitterness, a sense of injustice, and an utter disillusion with
the results of victory.

The Great Reaction

Ten years after the beginning of the war there is no sense of


security in Europe or the world. “The war to end war,” as it was
called, has done nothing of the kind. Beneath the surface of the
present peace there is a lava of hatreds and resentments which
bode ill for the future peace of the world. There are larger standing
armies in Europe now than in 1913. There are more causes of
quarrel, and none of the old quarrels have been extinguished—those
racial rivalries, those national ambitions, that commercial
competition. The war settled no argument for more than a period of
exhaustion. The idea of a “world safe for democracy” is falsified ten
years after by a swing-back to extreme forms of nationalism and
autocratic government through the greater part of Europe excepting
the British Isles and France. The German Republic, established after
annihilating defeat, is only biding its time for the return of monarchy,
and its present government is anti-democratic. Parliamentary
institutions, the safeguard of democracy, have been overthrown or
contemptuously treated in many nations. Italy, Spain and Hungary
are under military dictatorships. Russia is governed by a new-
fangled tyranny under which there is no liberty of speech,
conscience or economic life. Turkey, powerful again, is ruled by a
committee of generals. Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, are in
military alliance with France which, under Poincaré, ridiculed the
possibilities of peace based on the goodwill of its neighbours, and
relied for safety on a supreme army and the rule of Force.

The Peace Treaty

The Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the terms of peace upon


Germany and her Allies after their complete surrender, was the direct
cause of all the troubles that beset us after the war. It violated the
hopes of all moderate minded people, who believed that the world,
after its frightful lesson, was ready for a new chapter of civilisation in
which militarism might be overthrown as the greatest curse of life,
and in which the common folk of nations might be made secure in
their homes and work by a code of international law and arbitration.
The statesmen who presided over the Peace Conference—
Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George—had the fate of the world in
their hands. Waiting for their decisions, their new plan of Europe,
was a world of emotionalised men and women, ready and eager
then, for a little while, to respond to a generous idealism which would
lift all peoples above the morass of hatred and misery into which
they had fallen. The German and Austrian peoples, starved and
defeated, without a rag of pride left to cover their humiliation, fierce
with anger against their war lords—their Junkers and their politicians
of the old brutal caste—were ready also, for a little while, to join
hands with the world democracy in a new order of life. They were
conscience-stricken, ready to make amends, resigned to an awful
price of defeat—provided they were given their chance of recovery
and the liberty of their national life. They clung desperately to the
words of President Wilson who, before their surrender, had in his
Fourteen Points and other messages to the world outlined a peace
which would be generous to the defeated if they overthrew their old
gods, and would be based on justice, the rights of peoples, and the
commonwealth of nations rather than upon vengeance and hatred.
Fair words, holding out prodigious hopes of a new and better
world! But when the terms of the Peace Treaty were made known
they struck a knock-out blow not only to German hopes but to all the
ideals of people who had looked for something nobler and more
righteous by which the peace of the world should be assured. It was
a peace of vengeance. It reeked with injustice. It was incapable of
fulfilment. It sowed a thousand seeds from which new wars might
spring. It was as though the Devil, in a jester’s cap-and-bells, had sat
beside Clemenceau in his black gloves, and whispered madness into
the ear of Wilson, and leered across the table at Lloyd George, and
put his mockery into every clause. In that Hall of Mirrors at Versailles
the ideals for which millions of men had fought and died—liberty, fair-
play, a war to end war, justice—were mocked and outraged, not by
men of evil, but by good men, not by foul design, but with loyalty to
national interests. Something blinded them.
The Territorial clauses of the Treaty, based theoretically upon “the
self determination of peoples,” created a dozen Alsace Lorraines
when one had been a sore in Europe. The old Austrian Empire was
broken to bits—that was inevitable—but Austria, with its great capital
of Vienna, was cut off from its old source of life, condemned to
enormous mortality—which happened—and many of its people were
put under the rule of their ancient enemies. The Austrian Tyrol is now
the Italian Tyrol. Austrian property and populations are now in the
hands of Czechs and Slovaks and Serbians. Hungary was parcelled
out without consideration of nationality or economic life. Lines were
drawn across its waterways, its railway system and its roads. Its
factories, forests and mines were taken from it. Many of its folk were
handed over to Roumanians and other hostile peoples. The German
colonies in Africa were divided between Great Britain, France and
Belgium, although it is a biological necessity that Germany should
have some outlet for the energy and expansion of her population if
another war may be avoided. The Danzig corridor was made
between one part of Germany and another. Greece was given an
Empire in Asia Minor and Thrace, over Turkish populations which
she could only hold by the power of the sword at the cost of a future
war—which she has already fought and lost, abandoned by the
Governments which yielded to her claims.
The resurrection of Poland, by which one of the greatest crimes in
history was blotted out and national liberty given to the peoples of
Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stand to the credit of the
peacemakers, although these new nations have no security in the
future if Europe relies upon force rather than law. Other frontiers
drawn carelessly across the new map of Europe will be blotted out in
blood if ever again the passions stirring from the Rhine to the Volga
rise against the barriers imposed upon them in this uncertain peace.

The Fantastic Figures

But it was on the economic side of the Treaty and in its


interpretation that the statesmen of the Allies seemed to be stricken
with insanity, which infected many of their peoples until recent
months. Germany, they insisted, had to pay all the costs of the war,
for the damage she had inflicted and the ruin she had caused.
Theoretically, that was just if one took the view that every German
peasant, every German mother in a cheap tenement, every German
worker on starvation wages, every little sempstress, or University
student, ten or twelve years old when the war began, shares the
responsibility of those war lords and militarists who challenged the
world in 1914.
Practically it was not only unjust but idiotic, because it was
impossible, as everybody now acknowledges. It is almost beyond the
scope of mathematics to calculate the losses of the Allies in the war.
The British Government spent more in four and a half years of war
than in two and a half centuries previously. Could Germany pay that
back? England advanced two thousand million sterling to her Allies,
and borrowed nearly a thousand millions from the United States on
behalf of her Allies. Could Germany pay all that? France had
borrowed vast sums from her peasants and shopkeepers which she
debited against Germany; she owed Great Britain nine hundred
millions sterling, she had to restore the great track of ruin, with all its
destroyed homes, churches, farmsteads, châteaux—thousands of
villages wiped off the map so that hardly one stone remained upon
another—at a price which has loaded her with increased burdens of
debt far in excess of actual cost because French contractors desired
enormous profits. It was right and just that Germany should repair
that damage in the war zone, every brick of it and every stone. But
could she do so in money payments, in addition to all those other
claims? Could she pay also for war damage in Belgium, in Poland,
on the high seas, wherever her guns had reached? Italy had great
claims against Austria. Could Austria, brought to the edge of ruin,
amputated, lopped of all sources of wealth, pay that bill of costs?
Could Germany, the chief debtor, pay for the British unemployed in
the “devastated districts” of England and Scotland, whose ruined
trade was due to the war? All that, and then the pensions of
wounded soldiers and the widows of dead men and orphan children?
It would have been splendid if that were so. It might have been just
even to bleed the working folk of Germany, the younger generation,
the old women, the wounded and cripples even, the victims and
heirs of their war lords, to the last pfennig in their purses, if it is
justice that the individuals in a nation and their children and
children’s children are responsible for the guilt of their Governments.
But, justice or injustice apart, the absurdity, the wild impossibility, of
extracting all that vast tribute from the defeated enemy in terms of
transferable wealth, ought to have been manifest to the most
ignorant schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Yet it was the
illusion passionately professed by many great statesmen, by sharp-
witted business men, by bankers and financiers, and by the gullible
public who took their word for it, in France, Great Britain, and the
United States.

The Golden Lie


Or was it just one great lie to deceive the people of the victorious
nations and to keep them quiet by golden promises which the liars
knew in their hearts could never be fulfilled? One is tempted
sometimes to think so. It is now so transparently clear that not even
the richest and most powerful nation in the world of commerce—the
United States of America—could pay one tenth of the sum expected
from Germany after her overwhelming defeat, and the ruin of her
world trade, without overwhelming financial disaster, that it is
incredible that the greatest statesmen of the Allies and all their
experts and advisers could ever have believed in such mad
economics. Year after year there were assemblies of financial
gentlemen who solemnly sat round tables estimating Germany’s
capacity to pay. Year after year they reduced their estimates until
they were brought down to 6,600 millions, and then by easy stages
to 2,200 millions, while Europe sank deeper into economic misery;
while British trade declined; while Austria starved; while France grew
desperate for these payments; while Russia was famine-stricken;
while Germany poured out paper money which became worthless,
until her bankruptcy could no longer be concealed.
Future historians will be baffled by that psychology. They will hunt
desperately for some clue to the mystery of that amazing folly which
took possession of many people. They will call it perhaps the Great
Financial Hoax, and argue that it was a deliberate deception on the
part of the world’s leaders, afraid to confess to their nations that after
all their sacrifice there would be no “fruits of victory,” but only heavy
taxation, to pay for the costs of war which could not be shifted on to
enemy nations. I do not think it was quite as simple as all that. I think
in the beginning that sheer ignorance of the most elementary
economic laws led men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George to over-
estimate the power of a nation like Germany to transfer wealth in
money values to other nations. They did not understand that all
transferable wealth—or nearly all—can only be obtained by a trade
balance of exports and imports, and that the potential energy of a
nation, its factories and plant, its public buildings, bridges,
organisation and industry, are not transferable except by a balance
over exchange of goods. They were so hopelessly ignorant of
international finance that they actually did believe that they could
“squeeze” Germany of vast sums of money which could be divided
among the Allies for the settlement of their immense bill of costs,
without damaging their own trade or allowing Germany to trade
unduly in the markets of the world. One British statesman promised
his people that Germany should be squeezed like an orange until the
pips squeaked. French statesmen, like Poincaré, dazzled the eyes of
their people with golden visions. They balanced their budget by the
simple method of assuming that all that war debt would be paid by
Germany when pressure was firmly applied.
It was only later, when the politicians began to get a clear notion of
economic laws, by the painful lessons of reality and disillusion, that
they began to deceive their peoples and keep up the bluff. They
were afraid to tell the truth after all those falsities. In France, long
before the entry into the Ruhr, French economists, business men
and senators confessed privately that France could never hope to
get anything like her claims against Germany, and some of them,
more candid than others, shrugged their shoulders and said: “We
dare not tell the people—the shock would be too great.” The French
Press kept up the conspiracy of this deception, audaciously and
persistently throwing the blame of delay in getting German payments
upon Great Britain who did not stand by them in exerting “pressure.”
In Great Britain, dependent upon export trade for her main source of
wealth, and seeing the deadly stagnation of Europe and its
increasing loss of purchasing power, the truth of economic law was
more quickly perceived, and its statesmen shifted their policy and
forgot their golden promises more rapidly and with more public
candour.

The Downfall of Idealism

Looking back upon the years after the war, one sees that the
idealism, which for a little while might have changed the face of the
world if there had been great and noble leadership, fell with a crash
in many hearts because the interpreters of the Peace Treaty were
appealing not to the highest but to the lowest instincts of humanity;
to greed rather than justice; to vengeance rather than reconstruction;
to lies rather than truth. If only there had been one great leader in the
world who had cried: “We were all involved in this crime against
humanity, although Germany’s guilt was greatest; let us in the hour
of victory put vengeance on one side and so shape the peace that
the common folk of the world will have a better chance of life,” I
believe that in the time when the agony was great and the wounds
were still bleeding the hearts of people would have leapt up to him.
They would have responded if he had pleaded for generosity to the
defeated nations, if he had refused to punish the innocent for the
guilty, if he had asked them to forego the pound of flesh demanded
in the name of Justice, to forget the horror of the past, to escape
from it together, to march forward to a new chapter of civilisation not
based on standing armies, balances of powers, and cut-throat rivalry,
but upon new ideals of international law, business, common sense,
and Christian ethics.
People will say—do say—“It would have been weakness to let the
Germans off. They deserved to be punished. They would have made
a peace of terror, if they had had the chance of victory. There is
Justice to be considered. Justice demands its due, or God is
mocked.”
That is all true. It would have been weakness to let the Germans
off, but the surrender of their Fleet, the destruction of their Army, the
enormous sum of their dead was not a “let off.” They were broken
and punished, in pride and in soul. They would have made a peace
of terror? Yes, that is certain, and they would have aroused,
intensified and perpetuated a world of hate by which later they would
have been destroyed. Their war lords would have made a worse
peace than this of ours; but that is no argument why we should have
imitated their methods and morals.

The League of Nations

There was one institution created by the peacemakers which held


out a promise of a better relationship between nations than that of
military alliances and armed force divided into an uncertain Balance
of Power. All that was wrong in the Peace Treaties might be put right
by the League of Nations. The seeds of war sown by the Treaties
might be made to blossom into the laurels of peace by the League.
Although the Supreme Council set up by the Allies for the
enforcement of its military provisions might act on purely nationalistic
lines, the League of Nations would build up the international moral
sense, and establish a Court of Appeal by which injustice,
aggression, and the war spirit could be extirpated between all
nations subscribing to its code of laws, and the spirit of arbitration.
President Wilson comforted himself for any little defects which
might have crept into the Peace Treaties by this new instrument of
idealism which he had helped to create with a very passionate
enthusiasm. It was his great gift to the world and, as he hoped, the
fulfilment of the promises he had made to the world in his messages
before and after the ending of the war, appealing so poignantly to the
secret hopes of humanity that when he came to Europe as the great
arbitrator of its councils, he was received as the leader, spokesman,
and prophet of the New World which was to be built out of the ruins
of the Old. The rejection by the American Senate of all that he had
done killed Wilson. It also destroyed all immediate hopes of
European recovery based upon the League as an instrument of
reconstruction, co-operation and peace. It was one of the great
tragedies of history. Yet, looking back now upon the reasons of the
American refusal to enter the League of Nations, it is clear that it was
not entirely due to the personal antagonism which President Wilson
had aroused by certain defects of character—his autocratic methods,
his rejection of good counsel, and his mentality in the beginning of
the war, nor to a national selfishness on the part of the American
people, desiring to withdraw rapidly from responsibilities which they
had incurred by their entry into the war. From the American point of
view, at that time, the war had proved more than ever the supreme
good fortune of the United States in being remote from the hatreds
and quarrels of that mess of races in Europe out of which their
people had escaped in the past. They did not understand Europe.
They had no direct interest in its national rivalries. They could not
control or abate its passions. All opponents of the Wilson policy
regarded it as a calamity that the United States should surrender its
geographical immunity from the evil heritage of the Old World and
deliberately involve its future in that arena of ancient feuds. By
entering the League of Nations it seemed to many that the people of
the United States would be dragged into new wars in which they
would have no direct or indirect interest, and that they would have to
support and enforce the maintenance of European frontiers, re-
drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of passionate
resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling up of
territories which had taken place under the benignant name of
“mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French
rule in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in
Asia Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new
combination of powers which one day was bound to be challenged
and resisted? Above all was the New World to enter into military
alliance with France and Great Britain to support a policy of
domination in Europe which could only last as long as the German
people and their Allies were suffering from war exhaustion—a one-
sided pact which would make for the tyranny of certain powers, or at
least their military supremacy over other nations of the world? That
would be a surrender of the whole spirit of the American people, who
believed their destiny to be that of free arbitrators, and not partisans,
in the future of civilisation; friends of liberty and democracy
everywhere, and not allies on one side of a line. They had come into
the war, they believed, as crusaders for that ideal, defenders of
liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the thought that the ideal
should be narrowed down to the future defence of one group of
powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress the democratic
liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among others, they
rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson to France in
agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or merely
selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the
League of Nations.
This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar
upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was
immediately apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed
by the greatest economic power in the world. The exclusion of
Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary from its deliberations and
decisions made it seem—to hostile observers—an instrument
designed merely as a partisan body, upholding the opinions of the
victorious Allies and giving a sham morality to their policy.
That was unfair, because the Assembly, and its work behind the
scenes at Geneva, in which forty-three nations were represented, did
very quickly develop a spirit of international co-operation and law
rising above the low moralities of national selfishness. The
representatives of the League included large numbers of men who
were passionately inspired with the purpose of restoring order into
the chaotic conditions of Europe after war, healing its wounds,
creating good will in causes of quarrel by methods of arbitration and
persuasion, for the commonweal of peoples. The work and spirit of
Geneva was one source of light in a world of darkness, in those
dreadful years from which we have just emerged, and for that reason
it raised a standard of idealism round which millions of men and
women in many countries—even in the United States—rallied as the
one hope of the future.
It may be said without exaggeration that for the six years following
the war civilised humanity has been sharply divided into two camps
of thought—those who believe in the spirit of the League of Nations,
with its message of international co-operation and its faith in peace
by arbitration; and those who have no faith at all in this idealistic
purpose, and who believe in Force as the only method of
international relationship and the settlement of quarrels. Those two
camps still exist. The argument between them still goes on, and will
never cease until civilisation gives allegiance to a new code of law.
What frustrated the League in its work and decisions, after the
withdrawal of the United States, was the interpretation of the Peace
Treaties by the Great Powers, and the economic folly which took
possession of European statesmen. The League as one half of the
Peace Treaty found that its other half thwarted it in every possible
way. The left hand worked against the right. It was useless for the
League of Nations to press for the economic co-operation of Europe
when the Supreme Council and the Allied statesmen enforced
decisions which enlarged the area of ruin and thrust stricken people
deeper into misery. It was futile for the League to discuss
disarmament when France was building up a system of military
alliances, creating a Black Army, and lending enormous sums of
money to Poland and other States for maintaining their standing
armies. It was almost hopeless for the League of Nations to offer its
services for arbitration and to talk high moralities about international
justice when, to avenge the murder of some officers by unknown
assassins, Italy bombarded Corfu, killing innocent children; and
when Italy and France were secretly conniving with the Nationalist
Turks for a war against Greece, which was abandoned in its agony
to the horror of Smyrna.

The France of Poincaré

France, under the leadership of Poincaré, scoffed from the


beginning at the League of Nations, although supporting it over the
Corfu incident, and although one representative, M. Léon Bourgeois,
was a loyal friend of the League idea. After the refusal of the United
States to ratify the pact of security for France against another war of
German aggression, followed by the withdrawal of Great Britain, the
France of Poincaré saw no safety except in the power of her Army in
alliance with other forces which she could link in a military chain
around her defeated enemies. No one ought to blame France for that
philosophy, in view of her agony and her future peril. But it resulted
inevitably in actions which checked the recovery of Europe, aroused
all the old hatreds, filled the defeated peoples with a sense of
profound injustice, and raised the old devils of national pride,
vengeance, and belief in force which for a time had been banished to
the houses of the German Junkers and had lain low in German
hearts. It was the cause of increasing friction, spasms of passionate
ill-will, between France and England, and a long campaign of
scurrilous abuse in the French Press which poisoned the old Entente
Cordiale, wiped out the memories of war comradeship, and was a
tragic and painful chapter in recent history.
France under Poincaré demanded her pound of flesh from
Germany, including the lifeblood of the German people in the arteries
of its economic health. Germany could not recover nor, before
recovering, pay. Afterwards, when the Ruhr was invaded, their chief
source of wealth and of payment was strangled. The French objects
of “security” and “reparations” were in hopeless antagonism, and
defeated each other. There could be no reparations, on a large
scale, if French security demanded the expulsion of those who
directed and worked the Ruhr and its railways. There could be no
“security” for France in the long run if, instead of German
reparations, she goaded the German people into nationalism and a
war of vengeance by every means, fair or foul. While the policy of
Poincaré was dominant, Europe sank deep into despair, and the
nations most stricken by war saw no hope of revival.
The first three years after the world war provided terrible proofs of
the disaster which had happened to humanity in that deadly struggle.
Those who wish to convince the future generations of the
devastating effect of modern warfare upon highly organised nations,
as a frightful warning, must summon up the picture of Europe in
1919, 1920 and 1921. I saw it from end to end, and it haunted me.

The Russian Revolution

On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family
of nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in
anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were
ruling over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken,
crushed in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia.
They had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their
men had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been
taken from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high
places, inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of
revolt amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against
men with whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel;
peasants like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions
and hatreds which they did not share. They turned to rend their own
leaders and made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the
explosive forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of
tyranny by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its
present representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man
who loved his people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of
democracy, united for a time to overthrow the Government and all its
powers. Revolution, bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast
leapt up in peasant minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but
was swept on one side like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his
crowd took command, and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-
sounding, theoretically righteous, based upon the principles of
equality and brotherhood and peace, put a spell upon the simple
minds of the Russian folk. All opponents, critics, doubters, were
destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and his friends, having taken command
of the new machinery of Government by Soviet committees, were in
supreme power over a people unarmed, half-starving, and
submissive to those who had broken their old chains. It was some
time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters which
enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more
ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech,
freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers
published the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools
taught economic history according to Karl Marx and world history
according to Soviet philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in
which discipline was more severe than under the Grand Duke
Nicholas. The prisons were filled with people of all classes who
came under the notice of the secret police. Execution became a
habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as bad as that of the
French Revolution of 1793.
For a time the people as a whole were keyed up to a new
enthusiasm for what they believed to be a democratic system of
Government by attacks from the “White Armies” of the old Royalists,
financed, armed and organised by foreign powers, and especially by
France and Great Britain. As Republican France had risen against
the armies of the emigrés, so Soviet Russia rallied against the
armies of Koltchak, Denikin, Wrangel and others, and defeated them
overwhelmingly. After that the Reign of Terror abated somewhat,
internal revolt died down, and the gospel of Communism was seen
at work in conditions of peace.

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